Hello and welcome regulatora newspaper for the verge At the Washington intersection of technology and politics, consumers are flocking to car accidents on a daily basis. If you are not a customer, Sign up for our amazing editorial venture todayespecially as we process the end Musk vs. Altman. And if you have any tips about impending or hidden Washington car accidents, send them tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.
A quick note: regulator I’ll be on hiatus for the next two weeks while I take a much-needed vacation. Unfortunately, this means I’ll miss its public release Pope Leo XIV Encyclopedia of Humanity in the Age of TechnologyWhich I’ve been hearing about for months, but I hope others will too the verge The staff will be on it, so bookmark us!
Hot Rivalry, AI Super PAC Edition
Here’s a strange sign of AI super PACs becoming their own political giants: They’re now becoming their own political giants. On Tuesday, New York Democratic congressional candidates Alex BorsWhose campaign relied heavily on promoting AI regulation challenged Leading the Future – a $100 million pro-AI super PAC funded by Palantir Joe LonsdaleAndreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI greg brockman – for a personal, real-world debate. In a press release, the Bors campaign laid out its terms: Leading the Future can choose the moderator, it can choose its delegate, but it must commit to a debate before the June 23 primary.
The chances of this debate happening are negligible. (Leading the Future declined to comment about the debate challenge.) Still, this is a rapid escalation of a phenomenon I’ve been tracking for months: AI industry super PACs gaining their political reputation by mirroring the companies and founders that fund them, then using those reputations to fight back. each other.
When Leading the Future launched last year, it was fairly typical for a super PAC, as it was backed by a number of wealthy individuals and companies with shared policy goals, working at both the state and federal election levels. (Of course, this was politics on steroids: the Supreme Court famously ruled Citizens United Corporations had the right to free speech, leading to the creation of special campaign finance vehicles that allowed companies and wealthy donors to donate unlimited sums of money to political advocacy groups.) But shortly afterward, Meta announced that it was launching its own campaign. own AI-focused super PAC – an indication that the company’s AI interests, political and otherwise, did not necessarily align with those of the entities funding Leading the Future. Over time, LTF came to be seen as a vehicle not for the general AI industry, but specifically for OpenAI. (Many of LTF’s backers are investors in the company Frontier AI.) This sentiment was reinforced earlier this year, when Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, a bipartisan super PAC network that is supporting Bourse.
Legally, super PACs are not allowed to coordinate with candidates on things like ad buying and messaging. But while it’s common for companies to use super PACs to support candidates against other candidates, it’s perhaps innovative (and candidates, in some ways, incidental) for companies to use super PACs to attack their corporate rivals. Now, Public First is synonymous with anthropic and “doomism” (in LTF’s words), and LTF, as Borse put it, is now known as “the Marc Andreessen-Greg Brockman-Joe Lonsdale-backed Leading the Future super PAC.” And the beauty of non-coordination campaign finance laws is that Bores, the co-author of the New York State RAISE Act, can recuse himself from whatever human-funded political machinations are being perpetrated on his behalf. (Corporate money Is corporate money.)
Money earned by doing dishonest things? Like Dork Money: We haven’t even delved into the shady world of campaign finance vehicles, in which LTFs can start firing shots to please Trump. (Apparently, according to the new York Times, Leading the future is so bipartisan that Republicans can’t trust it.)
In March, a pro-AI, political advocacy messaging nonprofit called Innovation Council Action revealed itself to the public, run by a former advisor to Donald Trump. taylor budovich And already boasts a war chest of $100 million. Crucially, it received the recurring “blessing” regulator Character, David Sachs, Former White House Special Advisor on AI and Crypto. The ICA will apparently focus on promoting Trump’s AI agenda, and it’s meant to address a new issue inside the Republican Party: populist-leaning candidates unwilling to budge on any pro-industry positions. donald trump Is assured to repeat at any time.
(Who is pushing this agenda? We don’t currently know. ICA is known as a “dark money nonprofit,” meaning that unlike super PACs, it doesn’t legally have to disclose its donors.)
It’s time to regulate prediction markets!
The latest technology to cause a meltdown in Congress is prediction markets, which currently exist in a regulatory no man’s land: Is trading on a prediction market gambling, or is it something else entirely that deserves its own legislation? The Senate Commerce Committee is holding its first hearing on sports betting and prediction markets, and in a sign that the tech industry is really tech industry-ing, they’re sending out the big guns. patrick mchenryThe former Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who left Congress to join a16z and become a crypto lobbyist, will testify as a representative of a new industry advocacy group called the Coalition for Prediction Markets.
but what is even More Interestingly, a growing coalition of industries actually dislike prediction markets: the gaming industry (casinos and the like), futures markets, traditional sports betting, any type of industry that thinks prediction markets jeopardize their business. This is my first bet on who is behind FairPredicts, a “watchdog” group that launched a six-figure ad for this Senate hearing. The ads, which run in subway stations and digital in Washington (as well as on buses circling Capitol Hill — yes, really), are direct copies of Kalshi’s giant green ads from earlier this year:
And there is talk of a strategic industry alliance against Big Tech politics! The Senate Banking Committee markup of the CLARITY Act passed surprisingly quickly last week, with a 15-9 majority that included two Democrats approving it after nearly three hours of debate. The bill, which would create a financial framework around stablecoins, has already experienced a lot of drama: Coinbase dramatically canceled its support on interest yield, traditional banks went bearish in response, and all the while, the midterms have been looming in the background.
But procedurally and politically the drama is not over yet. There’s the reconciliation process, the floor vote in the Senate, the bill returning to the House, and whatever political maneuvering is going on between then and now. And politically, a growing number of generally right-wing industry groups are joining the banks in opposing the Clarity Act for a variety of reasons; Police unions believe it will prevent law enforcement from tracking money laundering, and labor unions believe it will drain workers’ pension funds. Once again, technology is making the horseshoe principle come true!
especially, My Holiday. Luckily, as long as I’m away, politics and technology won’t collide too aggressively at the intersection. But that might be too much to ask.
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